Jantzen's 100-year history reveals how Portland-made swimwear changed the world- and vice versa

Carol Alhadeff watches over Elvis in an old Northeast Portland office building, where, in a fashion, he resides.

With abiding affection and conscientious attention to detail, Alhadeff also safeguards memories of Princess Diana, Liz Taylor, Johnny Weissmuller, Esther Williams, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe, when she still was the fresh, fetching Norma Jeane Baker. The list goes on: stars of sport and screen, royalty and commoners, some of the world's most stunning women and strapping men, all of whom at one time or another slipped into a swimsuit whose tag read "Jantzen."

As the swimwear maker's archivist, Alhadeff cares for a treasure trove of more than 2,000 garments, plus illustrations, photographs, advertising copy and other items dating to Jantzen's founding in Portland 100 years ago.

The archive, often used for inspiration by today's designers, holds far more than a century of style. It reflects social upheaval, women's liberation, sexual revolution, political change and corporate shifts. It bears evidence of manufacturing innovation, the history of textiles, the evolution of merchandising, advertising and Jantzen's logo, "Red Diving Girl," who looks, after all these years, fabulously fit.

None of it could have a guardian better suited than Alhadeff, whom Lorraine Medici, vice president of marketing, calls "a walking encyclopedia."

Alhadeff has admired the brand since she was a girl growing up in Portland in the 1940s and '50s. Summers, she worked picking berries "so I could have a Jantzen suit," she says, "so I could have that diving girl on my hip."

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August is a fine time to consider swimwear.

No promises, but most years Oregon warms enough by the eighth month to warrant swimming-hole dips or days at the beach sans sweatshirts. And this August, hundreds of former Jantzen employees will descend on the Portland area for a centennial reunion.

Jantzen first advertised bathing suits in its 1915 catalogs. They were knitted from pure wool, which sounds itchy and less-than-practical, but the unisex unitards were a big improvement over head-to-toe, modesty-gone-mad bathing costumes of earlier eras.

In ancient times, those stepping into the water for personal hygiene or pleasure asked neither, "Is this suit morally acceptable?" nor "Does it make me look fat?"

They simply swam nude.

Greeks and Romans stigmatized those who didn't know how to swim. Men and women bathed together. Freedom reigned.

But after Rome fell, Bruce Wigo says, that was the end of that.

"Europe not only lost the art of swimming, but didn't bathe for 1,000 years," he says, exaggerating to make his point.

Uptight sensibilities didn't float in other cultures: In some regions of sub-Saharan Africa, both genders swam from the time they could walk. In the Americas, indigenous women taught children to swim, and no one covered up because "they didn't associate nudity with sex," says Wigo, president and chief executive officer of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

In the Western world, for practical reasons, sailors revived interest in swimming; they didn't bother with suits.

It took disasters to dramatically shift thinking about swimming and women.

In 1878, the Princess Alice, an excursion boat, collided with another craft on England's Thames River. When it broke in half and sank, about 400 women drowned. And in 1904, the excursion liner General Slocum caught fire and burned in New York's East River. Of the more than 1,300 passengers, most of them women and girls, about 1,000 died.

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To three ambitious young men, Portland must have seemed ripe with opportunity in 1910. Five years earlier, the city had played host to a world's fair, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. The publicity helped Portland's population explode to about 207,000 and all those newcomers needed warm clothes.

Carl C. Jantzen and brothers John A. and C. Roy Zehntbauer founded Portland Knitting Co., Jantzen's predecessor. They set up shop downtown, producing wool sweaters, hosiery and other knit goods.

The men belonged to the Portland Rowing Club and in 1913, a fellow member asked if the company could knit something stretchy and warm enough to keep the chill away while sculling along the Willamette River. Lycra and Gore-Tex, of course, were as unfathomable as space travel and the Internet.

Using a sweater cuff machine, they knitted a suit from virgin wool. Wet, it weighed 8 pounds, but it did the trick.

A lighter version became the prototype for the bathing suits the company first offered in 1915. The garment built the company into an international name.

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Alhadeff, the archivist, works in three rooms in an orange brick building that hunkers down like history between Northeast Sandy Boulevard and Glisan Street.

She started with Jantzen more than 40 years ago, shortly after graduating with a design degree from Marylhurst College, now Marylhurst University. Then, she wore a hat and gloves to work as the youngest member of the previously all-male in-house advertising department.

Today, more casual but still coifed, Alhadeff passes under an awning labeled "Jantzen," through a locked door, past work stations busy with the nearly 50 Jantzen employees remaining in Portland since Perry Ellis International bought the brand in 2002. They make patterns, print fabric, sew garments, coordinate products and do other tasks.

The company once employed about 4,000 in buildings covering five square blocks, says Al Zindel, the former head of the women's wear division and a reunion organizer. Its footprint was biggest, Alhadeff says, from the late 1950s to the 1970s, when Jantzen had 18 design studios worldwide.

Behind another locked door is the three-room archive, and though not open to the public, it's the equivalent of a candy store for fashion hounds.

Much as Alhadeff would love to have one of each Jantzen swimsuit ever made, she doesn't, although new purchases and donations of vintage suits arrive frequently. The oldest in the collection is a black and gold striped tank from 1918.

Many Jantzen suits bear suggestive names: the Smoothie, the Double Dare, the Man Trap, the Temptation, and the late Diana, Princess of Wales' favorite, Sheer Delight. She wore a size 12 and told a Jantzen distributor she liked the suits for their long torsos. The company liked her back: It sent her a letterman jacket, its back adorned with the diving girl logo and embroidered with the name of one of the world's most stylish women: Diana.

By then, style had reigned at Jantzen a long time. In 1957 and '58 even the great Hubert de Givenchy designed Jantzen suits in his Paris salon.

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Suits tell only part of Jantzen's story.

Shortly after changing its name in 1918 to Jantzen Knitting Mills, the company in remote little Portland set its sights on big things. It built a national sales force and distribution channels. Legend has it, Alhadeff says, that sales manager Mitch Heinemann pulled Jantzen swimsuits on over his business suit, proving the product's superior stretch factor to buyers.

The company launched advertising in such wide-circulation magazines as Vogue, Life and The Saturday Evening Post. Ads slick with psychology pushed a societal shift: Taking a dip wasn't a chore anymore. It was a choice.

Jantzen, ads decreed, was "the suit that changed bathing to swimming."

Tucked into manila envelopes and file folders, old ads illustrated by the top artists of the day fill floor-to-ceiling shelves in the archive. One ad diagrams the crawl, scissors kick, side and breast strokes. "Are you learning to swim?" the text asks. "There's a wonderful ease of motion in the Jantzen-stitch fabric and patented features. Are you an expert? It's the suit Olympic champions wear!"

Long before Nike got into the endorsement game, Jantzen outfitted swimmers Duke Kahanamoku and Norman Ross, and diver Louis Kuehn, all of whom won gold in the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. Over the years, the company persuaded many other amateur and professional athletes -- from swimmers and race car drivers to golfers and skiers -- to wear its garments.

Jantzen wrapped Hollywood in tight, too. Its catalogs pictured such stars or up-and-comers as Loretta Young, Dick Powell and James Garner wearing Jantzen; in turn, the actors used the glamour shots for publicity.

Elizabeth Taylor wore Jantzen in 1951's "A Place in the Sun." Elvis Presley did, too, a decade later in the musical "Blue Hawaii." And in 1963, Jantzen suited Annette Funicello perfectly in "Beach Party."

But one athlete, one star, stood out above all the others.

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After Red Diving Girl first appeared on the cover of a 1920 Jantzen catalog -- or style sheet, as it was called -- plenty of women claimed the toned, frisky logo was modeled after them.

Truth was, in the late 1910s artist Florenz Clark sketched divers training at Portland's Multnomah Athletic Club for the 1920 Olympic Games. Research suggests that the finished logo was drawn from a composite of those sketches and refined with help from Clark's artist husband, Frank. They made sure she didn't catch cold: The original diving girl takes the plunge in long socks and red and white wool hat.

She was a winner, remaining one of the longest-lived apparel icons, even after a few face-lifts and tummy tucks.

Jantzen's marketing wizards made the most of her. They had 10,000 Red Diving Girl stickers printed in spring 1922, sending them to retailers for window displays. By 1927, 5 million diving-girl decals decorated cars around the country, including those that Alhadeff's father drove.

Four 21-foot Fiberglas diving girls remain, one hanging from the outfield wall in Portland's PGE Park. One's in storage in Vancouver; one hangs, as she has since 1965, above Stamies Smart Beach Wear in Daytona Beach, Fla.; and one tours department stores, inspiring customers, as diving girl always has, to buy Jantzen.

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Getting the name and logo out there long has been a company strength, if Miss America pageants and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues are good indicators.

Jantzen hit a marketing home run two weeks ago when the cable TV series "Mad Men" wrote the company's founders into the season-premier script.

For all three past seasons, Jantzen has provided the show, about 1960s Madison Avenue, with images from its archive for use as set decor. The comedic drama "Ugly Betty" includes a 1956 billboard in one of its sets. It reads, "All girls are gorgeous in Jantzen."

In the July 25 "Mad Men" plot, pitchman Don Draper shows Jantzen family executives his idea for what will sell: a bikini-clad model with a headline covering her breasts. "So well built," the text reads, "we can't show you the second floor."

The fictional Jantzens, preferring wholesome over suggestive, hate it. Draper, preferring his way or the highway, shows the swimwear moguls the door.

Alhadeff didn't see the episode but worries it might have made Jantzen seem stodgy. But Medici, the marketing vice president, relishes the prominence in a show that's won nine Emmys and four Gold Globe awards.

"It's just the frosting on the cake from a marketing perspective," she says. "It's great exposure. ... It just shows that we're very timely. It's what people are responding to today."

For this year's collection, Jantzen went straight to the archives in honor of the company's 100th birthday. Senior designer Lisa Dixon selected suits from a few eras, then retooled them with a 21st-century twist.

The French Curve, a red ruffled two-piece, seems sweeter than the glamorous 1940s-vintage Jantzen that inspired it.

And the black, stretch-velvet monokini?

Dixon says that when she plucked a 1970s suit from the archive, she knew it would inspire the ultra-sexy look she wanted in a new suit. When she finished her redesign for the Heritage Collection, she says, "I thought, 'Oh! Cher would wear this.'"

That, Alhadeff says, is why she spends her days shopping for and conserving the most special suits, sweaters and other items from the company's long history. Fashion repeats itself. Often, inspiration splashes in from eras gone by.

Jantzen's archive -- portions of it frequently photographed for magazines and sometimes displayed in museums or department stores -- holds its past and its future.